Day 15 Redux: NOCHNOY DOZOR (2004)

For those of you who do not speak Russian, that's NIGHT WATCH by director Timor Bekmambetov. I was intrigued by this film because I had, apparently in error, assumed it was the inspiration for the song "Night Man," written by Charlie on IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA.

Kidding, of course. The reason I sought out this film was because I greatly enjoyed Bekmambetov's first English language work, WANTED (2008), which was loosely based on an even more lossely plotted comic book series by Mark Millar. Like that film, NIGHT WATCH is high on awesome but low on substance. So much so, in fact, that after about twenty-five minutes I had gotten the gist of it and was not at all motivated to carry on with the rest.

From what I could gather, in ye olde times, the forces of Good and the forces of Evil roamed the earth. Then, in order to prevent mutually assured destruction, they called a truce. This truce is enforced by... vampires? Or people with random powers that are all called vampires for some reason? In either case, its an excuse for cool camera angles and action sequences and stuff exploding. (I did not personally witness any explosions in the roughly one-fourth of the film I watched but I assume that eventually some explosions ensued. Safe bet.)

Let me stress that I am not accusing this of being a bad film. With the caveat that you understand its the cinema equivalent of cotton candy, it s a perfectly plausible was to spend a couple hours. I just was not in the mood for it at the time.

OVERALL: I did not bother to finish watching this film, so I have no right to give it a review. Instead, let me take this opportunity to rate Vladimir Putin's recently released judo instructional video. While I have not seen that either, I prospectively give it *****/5 Resurgent Evil Empires.